Entering a better year

29 Dec 2020

2020 has been a giant clusterfuck. What started as a two week mandatory work from home situation turned into a two month work from home situation, eventually evolving into a permanent work from home situation. The adjustment was challenging, especially for someone as easily distracted as me; but here we are, beaten up but still standing.

The first two months were very nice and eventful: my sister visited me in Toronto, our put band got to put up half our show, our stage band got to play a few gigs, and I got to hang out with my friends while I still had a chance. Once the pandemic hit Canada and we went into lockdown, my lifestyle really took a drastic change. My sleep schedule became erratic, I stopped exercising regularly, and naturally my mental health took a toll as I wasn’t able to see my friends and family over the summer.

However, I’d come to learn to live with it - I forced myself to sleep somewhat normally and started running again. I’d hang out with my friends online where we would play different games together, and of course, alcohol helped (joking, kind of). At this point, I was still working at Ubisoft, but my work productivity remained decent enough, even if it did feel pretty lonely at times.

Once summer ended, so did my internship at Ubisoft and it was back to school for me. It was a rough transition at first, especially since the online format wasn’t something I’d done at school before. I must say, although I miss seeing other people, online classes are actually pretty great - the ability to watch lectures at my own pace is such a big help to both my ability to absorb knowledge and to stay focused. Now sitting at the end of the semester, I’m pretty burnt out from 6 courses but hopefully I passed them all, fingers crossed!

Overall, I’m fairly happy with how I managed my time this year. Obviously, I wasn’t perfect with my productivity, but with the extra time I had from social isolation, I managed to get back into art and other creative outlets like animation and music. I was also able to level up my cooking, experimenting with new dishes and cuisines - I even made a cooking video.

I’ve also started twitch streaming my art weekly, and I haven’t missed a single week since I started! Through a spike in viewership while I was streaming a game jam, I was actually able to reach affiliate status on Twitch, which came as a huge surprise to me. Although twitch streaming isn’t a high priority for me, it was still nice to hit such a cool achievement.

2021

I feel like I was able to improve my work ethic overall in 2020, and I’m hoping to continue improving in 2021. I’ll set small goals throughout the year, and hopefully become slightly more and more productive. I’m also going to set a few more concrete goals for myself this year, as I feel a bit more confident in my ability to follow through. First, I have some general goals I want to hit:

Run more
Eat more vegetables and less meat
Drink less
Watch less youtube
Build more gundam models
Draw more
Make more games

From these goals, I’m going to set a few concrete milestones to hit this year.

  • Run a full marathon
  • No meat on Tuesday/Thursday/Sunday
  • Alcohol budget of $30/month
  • Build 4 full gundam models
  • Twitch stream every monday (100 follower goal)
  • Finish web RPG
  • Find a job for after graduation
  • 10 artstation posts
  • Learn machine learning
  • Build some sort of networking side project

That gives me 10 goals/milestones to aim for in 2021. This year was tough, here’s to a better year!

Some tweets showcasing art I’m proud of this year :)

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